August 17, 2010

First impressions after using Android (HTC Aria) for few days. Overall phone works fine; the main issues are with usability for both hardware and software.

1. Back button. UI relies on the back button to navigate back through pages. However unlike software back button on iPhone, HW back button is located in the right bottom corner which makes it hard to access with one hand.

2. Download notification UI. I spent 5 minutes looking for a way to save attachment in gmail just to find that the item goes to notification queue. Completely undiscoverable.

3. What exactly is home button. My expectation is that home screen is the whole area where I can put my icons and widget. Home button is designed so it navigates to one particular page on the home screen.

4. App install is not designed for the scenario when I want to use the app immediately. Why app is not places to the home screen? Why do I have to look for an app in the long list of apps which I cannot even re-arrange

5. Kind of minor but why can’t I associate picture with a contact? I added a shortcut for contact to the home screen but the shortcut is displayed as the default icon. By the way, HCT contact widget is completely useless piece of junk; cannot even make a call to a contact number which works in other cases.

6. Why so many applications are asking to access Geo location and why there is no way to install and app but still block access? This is really an issue with Android ecosystem in general. I expect that the owner of app marketplace (Google) to work with developers at submission time to not require unnecessary rights. Otherwise we get bunch of apps which “prevent device from sleeping” as a side-effect.

August 8, 2010

The main feature which is missing for me in Mercurial is staging. I want to be able to make checkins very often (for every save operation) but only perform full checkins when changes reach certain logical stage. Mercurial does not expose such functionality probably for simplicity reasons. To bad.